South America
Argentina is moving up the international drug-trafficking food chain, I report in this weekend's New York Times. “In terms of accessibility, you have it on every street corner,” Martín Iribarne, an addiction specialist and the director of the San Camilo Foundation, told me. “In the beginning, we accepted that the cartels came here on their way to other places. Afterwards, it was our market.” Argentina has the highest percentage of cocaine users in the 15- to 64-year-old demographic across South and Central America with 25 percent of the region's users, second only to Brazil, according to the UNODC.
Formerly just a transit hub for cartels moving drugs to other places, including Europe and the U.S., Argentina is playing a bigger role because of the ease to access pirated pharmaceuticals used to cook synthetic drugs like meth and ecstasy, attracting traffickers from across Latin America who perceive the country as a relative safe haven and who repay their middle men with drugs. The result is a a new generation of addicts of paco, cocaine base that can be smoked, which is having a devastating affect in Argentina, especially on the poor, as this excellent Guardian report explains.
Formerly just a transit hub for cartels moving drugs to other places, including Europe and the U.S., Argentina is playing a bigger role because of the ease to access pirated pharmaceuticals used to cook synthetic drugs like meth and ecstasy, attracting traffickers from across Latin America who perceive the country as a relative safe haven and who repay their middle men with drugs. The result is a a new generation of addicts of paco, cocaine base that can be smoked, which is having a devastating affect in Argentina, especially on the poor, as this excellent Guardian report explains.
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My article in The New York Times tells the story of Argentina's transgender community. It's a community that lives in the shadows, dropping out of school early, avoiding hospitals and reverting to prostitution because of a lack of opportunity. A third of the estimated 22,000 trans Argentines has HIV/AIDs, contributing to an average life span of a mere 35 years. Argentina recently passed the first law in the world that doesn't pathologize being transgender. While a great deal of case law has emerged globally allowing transgender people to change their names and even gender on official documents, only Argentina says a person doesn't have to be diagnosed by a psychiatrist as suffering from gender dysphoria or undergo surgery. I heard a lot of really moving stories that testify to the profundity of this law.
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People wave Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party) flags at a May 1 rally in
front of the government mansion in Buenos Aires. E. Schmall
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A contribution to a GlobalPost special report on labor, I analyze the fragmentation of the left in Argentina by visiting Labor Day celebrations around Buenos Aires. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has distanced herself from unions, the traditional backers of Peronist politicians, relying instead on the mobilization of a group of young political upstarts called La Campora. The radical left, composed mainly of union workers, counter-culture activists and the Argentine intelligentsia.
I arrived in Buenos Aires April 11, literally just in time for President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to introduce a law to expropriate YPF, the former national oil company sold to Spain's Repsol during the Menem administration. Here's my story with Simon Romero for The Times on April 12.
It was a huge moment for Argentina. The general perception had been that Repsol had failed to invest in the oil wells it controlled, and that Menem's sale had been one mistake among many leading to the 2002 collapse. The president's move--celebrated and urged on in graffiti and posters plastered all over the city--garnered a cross section of public support. Fernandez de Kirchner called it "a recovery of sovereignty and control," rhetoric to bolster the appearance that it was taking back something that belonged to the people.
The YPF logo, imprinted everywhere, became again the symbol of economic independence and public energy it served to represent in 1922, when it was founded, the first oil company in the world to be established as a state enterprise. As I reported in GlobalPost, some segments of Argentina's traditional left, and an increasing number of unions, are skeptical "The government is talking to Chevron, to Total. It's not nationalization, it's re-privatization," an activist told me at a May Day demonstration in Buenos Aires' iconic Plaza de Mayo, which faces the government mansion.
The expropriation of YPF was just the latest in a series of controversial policies that the Kirchner-led government says are designed to shield Argentina's economy from the whims of the global market. But government controls on foreign currencies are fueling black markets, as I reported for the BBC. Industrial contractions and salary disputes in the face of what most economists say is 20 to 25 percent inflation are posing an increasing challenge to the government.
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I spent a few months reporting in Peru in 2010. Here's a piece for Reuters on water wars breaking down in the arid farmland south of Lima as demand for Peru's agricultural exports pick up.
I also reported on the Peruvian government's battle against a resurgence of the radical left after MRTA symbols began to appear in middle-class Lima neighborhoods and Shining Path leaflets in university classrooms. A low-level civil war in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s cost the Andean nation 69,000 lives.
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| Credit: Reuters File |
I spent a few months reporting in Peru in 2010. Here's a piece for Reuters on water wars breaking down in the arid farmland south of Lima as demand for Peru's agricultural exports pick up.
I also reported on the Peruvian government's battle against a resurgence of the radical left after MRTA symbols began to appear in middle-class Lima neighborhoods and Shining Path leaflets in university classrooms. A low-level civil war in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s cost the Andean nation 69,000 lives.
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